GUMMIBAR
Research and Design: Rachel Refael
Project: Graduation Project
Supervisors: Ephraim Joris, Federico Martelli
Photos by: Chiara Catalini
Exhibited at: Manifestations, Dutch Design Week 2021
Texts by: Rachel Refael
Supported by: Van Beek Donner Stichting, MIARD Alumni Research Award
“Made to Disappear” explores the living room as a site of performance influenced by the forced exclusion of sex work from the public sphere under Bill C-36. This project is based on interviews with a Canadian sex worker, and her spatial negotiation within the home.
By researching the division of private and public spaces for sex workers operating within domestic interiors, the project explores the living room both as a heterotopic realm and as a domestic extension of the Polis. While being either disposable or easily sterilized, all the materiality in this project carries foreign traces into the idea of domesticity. It strips the space of ornamental comfort through multiple spatial references such as; massage parlours, bachelor pads, and clinical sites.